Email reply to forum post notifications

This is a forum to suggest new features for mojoPortal. 

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11/27/2011 1:01:42 PM
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feet planted firmly on the ground

Email reply to forum post notifications

I get notifications of new posts to a forum - would be nice to be able to hit reply and have it automatically posted. I've been using Basecamp recently, and their email notifications allow this. I think they create a "from" address that uniquely identifies the thread (e.g. here's one from a project I'm working on - slightly obscured because this probably tunnels through their security  U2C36A606D8D6I17794254-reply@gocamping.basecamphq.com") and then they parse any text that is above the original "From:......" as the new post.

Not exactly high priority, but saves a few seconds here and there, allowing a few more sand castles to be built and washed away.

11/27/2011 1:55:15 PM
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Re: Email reply to forum post notifications

While I agree it would be a nice feature, it is a rather tall order and not likely something I will get to in the near future.

It would require some extra server component for a pop email account that receives the message to then be able to post programmatically into the forum. Doing this in a way that enforces the security of the forum and prevents spam would be a significant amount of work. And then even if implemented it would not be usable by most people in shared hosting because it would require a pop account that can execute custom code. The needed extra component could only be installed by those with full control of the server.

I'm pretty sure stackoverflow doesn't support any replies by email and that is the best forum I know of and the one I would like ours to emulate at some point.

So lots of work for a small improvement that wouldn't be useable by many people is not something I'm likely to work on soon, the cost/benefit ratio is too high.

Basecamp is a hosted service I believe, so they are able to do this since they can manage the pop email accounts and all other aspects of their servers. As far as I know Basecamp is not software that you can install on your own servers or in shared hosting. It would be much more challenging to provide software and support to enable others to do this than it would to implement it on your own servers.

Best,

Joe

11/27/2011 2:35:07 PM
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feet planted firmly on the ground

Re: Email reply to forum post notifications

Yes Basecamp is hosted, and I thought this would be a long shot, but thanks for considering it anyway.

 

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